NoMachine Virtual Desktops help health center cut costs

The Mental Health Center of Riagg Rijnmond reduced their employee desktop budget by two-thirds by ditching their proprietary hardware and software for a Linux and open source-based system, which includes NoMachine software.

For more than two decades, the Mental Health Center of Riagg Rijnmond has been providing exemplary outpatient care to people with psychological and psychiatric issues in The Netherlands and around the world. Riagg Rijnmond knows only too well the constant pressure that healthcare organizations face balancing affordable and high-quality patient care. Struggling with considerable licensing costs, the organization needed a better solution for providing virtual desktops to their 350 employees.

Based on testing and the recommendation from Dutch IT software and system solution provider, ECsys, Riagg Rijnmond implemented a new solution consisting of IGEL Linux-based thin clients, Xen hypervisor and NoMachine software. Riagg Rijnmond determined that this solution maintained their strict standards of security, dependability, and user performance.

NoMachine NX, an enterprise-class solution for accessing server-based desktops and applications, made accessing desktops seamless as well as secure for employees, which is especially critical when handling electronic patient records. Employees are happy with the speed and performance provided by NoMachine. They are now able to access an easy-to-use Xubuntu desktop and all their critical business programs, including email and an open-source equivalent to Microsoft Office.

Riagg Rijnmond spent a little over a year on the entire project. However, the project was so well-prepared that the actual implementation only took around two weeks to roll out. Now the daily management of user desktops is significantly easier, and it comes at a lower cost. ECsys' president, Nieck Zanen, estimates that the NoMachine/IGEL project cost about a third of the budget that would have otherwise been spent to update proprietary licenses that were part of the previous Citrix/Wyse setup.